Sharky’s Machine (1981) Review
7/10
A narcotics officer blows an operation in public, is demoted to vice, and is given four people nobody else wants. They start watching a high-priced call girl because she’s the only thread anybody has, and the watching becomes the film. The 7 is for a picture with three good ideas and a fourth act that abandons two of them. The surveillance material is superb, the score is among the best in any American film of the period, and the last thirty minutes become a conventional pursuit.
It’s also considerably more violent than its reputation, including a torture sequence that was cut in several territories and is still difficult to sit through.
I like this movie a lot more than its reputation suggests I should. Burt Reynolds made a quiet, sad cop picture about men listening to a woman through a wall, and for an hour it had me completely. Then it remembers it’s a Burt Reynolds movie, and I can feel the air go out of it.
The Surveillance Is the Film
The middle hour is four police officers in an empty apartment across the street from a woman they’re recording, and the film understands what that does to people. The structure is precise. Shifts, equipment, boredom, a whiteboard, and four men who have nothing to do but listen to somebody else’s life for weeks. Sharky falls for her. That’s the obvious development, and the film is more interested in the mechanism than the romance.
The equipment is also specific enough to be credible.
Reel-to-reel recorders, a telephone tap that has to be physically installed, a camera with a long lens on a tripod, and the film spends time on the tedium of maintaining all of it across a rotation of shifts. I could watch another hour of that tedium. This stretch justifies the 7 on its own.
What makes it work is that he never meets her during this stretch. Everything he knows is a recording, a photograph and a window, and the picture is clear that what he’s fallen for is an assembled version of somebody.
The photographs are the clearest version of that. He’s a wall of them, taken at distance, and the film shows him looking at images of a woman doing ordinary things while listening to a recording of her doing something else entirely. Rachel Ward has the harder half of that structure. Dominoe has to be watchable through a window for an hour, with almost no dialogue directed at anybody, and then become a person when the film finally lets them meet.
The Conversation is the film this material is standing next to and it’s not embarrassed. This isn’t as good and it’s working on the same idea: listening to somebody is a way of inventing them.
Surveillance is one of the strongest available structures because it gives the reader information the protagonist can’t act on. The attachment forms through fragments. That means the character is building somebody out of incomplete material, and the reader can see them doing it.
Keep them apart. The moment they meet, the invented version collides with a person, and the collision is the scene the whole structure has been for.
Give the watchers a working routine. Shifts, logs and equipment establish duration, and duration makes the attachment credible.
The Score
The soundtrack is assembled from existing jazz and blues recordings and it’s used more intelligently than almost any original score of the period.
The approach is diegetic wherever possible. Music is coming from a radio, a club, an apartment, a car, and the film repeatedly places the source in the scene instead of laying a cue over it.
That produces the film’s best effect. During the surveillance stretch, the music Sharky hears is the music she’s playing. That means the score is part of what he’s falling for.
There’s also a long stretch where the surveillance team argues about the music itself, four men in an empty apartment developing opinions about somebody else’s record collection. That’s my favorite scene in the picture and the most relaxed and convincing the film ever gets. I’d happily trade ten minutes of the closing chase for ten more minutes of that argument.
Randy Crawford, Doc Severinsen, Chet Baker, Sarah Vaughan and Julie London are all on it, and the selection isn’t decorative. Each cue belongs to one room in the film, and a track recurring is how the film tells the audience which of the film’s several rooms they’ve just been put back inside without a word of dialogue.
Reynolds reportedly fought for the soundtrack and paid for a considerable amount of it, and the decision is the clearest evidence that he understood what he was making. A conventional orchestral score would have removed the film’s entire atmosphere.
Atlanta
The film is rooted in one city at one moment and it’s one of very few American crime pictures to use Atlanta as somewhere and not as a location.
The geography is political. A downtown of new towers, a vice district a few blocks away, and a mayoral campaign running through the whole plot, and the film is explicit that the three are connected.
It’s specific about which blocks. Peachtree, the Omni, a stretch of massage parlors and bars, and a mayoral candidate whose campaign office and whose money are in the same few square miles as the business he’s promising to clean up. That connection is the plot. The candidate, the money, the woman and the police department are one system, and what obstructs the investigation is the ordinary operation of people protecting an arrangement. I find that far more believable than a secret cabal, and I think it’s the smartest thing in the script. Henry Silva plays the enforcer and it’s the most frightening performance in the picture. Billy Score is a user, entirely unpredictable, and the one character with no interest in the arrangement everybody else is protecting.
The final sequence takes place in one of those towers. That’s the correct place for it. A film about a city’s new money resolving itself at the top of the tallest building in it makes the point without a line of dialogue.
The fall from that building is also the film’s most discussed stunt, performed by Dar Robinson from over two hundred feet onto an airbag, and it’s filmed in a single unbroken shot from the top instead of cut into pieces.
Use one city properly instead of several generically. A vice district four blocks from a new financial district is a whole political argument available in a single establishing shot. The Gray Man on this site shows the opposite with seven countries and no geography at all.
Run a legitimate public process through your criminal plot. An election, a planning decision or a contract award connects the two halves without anybody explaining the connection.
Stage your climax in the location your theme lives in. The tallest building in the city is where the money is, and the film never has to say so.
Reynolds Directing
He made five films as a director and this is the only one anybody should seek out, and the difference is that he’s not the whole subject of it.
The performance is also restrained by his standards. Sharky is quiet, tired, physically diminished after the opening, and Reynolds plays down the charm that was his entire commercial value at the time.
The opening sequence establishes the demotion physically. He’s in a foot chase, makes a decision that goes wrong in public, and the film puts him in vice within ten minutes without anybody delivering a speech about his career.
What he’s good at behind the camera is staging and pace. The surveillance sequences have rhythm, the violence arrives without warning, and the film cuts away from its own set pieces earlier than a studio picture would.
Where he’s less secure is tone. There are comic beats in the squad room that belong to a different film, and they arrive between sequences of real unpleasantness without any transition. Those beats are the first thing I’d cut. Every one of them lets the tension out of a film that’s working hard to build it.
The squad itself is well cast around him. Brian Keith, Charles Durning, Richard Libertini and Bernie Casey are four character actors given a room and time in it, and the boredom between them reads as men who have worked together for years.
The Torture Sequence
Sharky is taken, restrained and mutilated, and the sequence is long, specific and filmed without any relieving cuts. It’s the moment the film declares what it is. Up to that point the picture could be read as a stylish thriller, and afterward it can’t, and the second half is a man operating with an injury the film never lets the audience forget.
The consequence is carried through. That’s the reason to respect it. He’s permanently damaged, the damage affects what he can do, and the film doesn’t restore him for the finale.
The final confrontation turns on that limitation. He can’t use one hand properly, the film has established it for forty minutes, and it stages the last fight entirely around what a man with that injury can and can’t physically do.
Whether the sequence is necessary is a real question. The argument for it is that the injury has to be real for the ending to mean anything, and the argument against is that the film could have established the same fact in a third of the running time.
Reynolds also performed a considerable amount of his own physical work here and had been injured on a previous production. That’s context instead of justification and does explain the specificity of how he plays the aftermath.
If you injure a protagonist, keep the injury. A wound that’s forgotten by the next chapter tells the reader that nothing in your book has weight. The test is whether the climax is harder because of it. Here it is. That’s what justifies the sequence. A long depiction and a brief one establish the same fact and cost the reader differently. Decide what you’re charging them for.
The moment a work declares its tone should be irreversible. Once this film has shown you that, the stylishness is no longer available, and that’s a deliberate exchange.
Should you watch Sharky’s Machine?
Yes, and it’s badly underseen. The surveillance hour, the jazz and Atlanta used as a political argument are why it gets a 7 from me, and they’re good enough that I’ll forgive a lot. What keeps it from an 8 is the last half hour sliding into a standard chase, and a torture sequence I think could have made its point in a third of the time, even though I respect the film for carrying that injury all the way to the end.
